Wicked Schemes

Chapter 3

Warning: I don't know if a warning is actually needed, but Klaus is very much Klaus in this chapter. As in the lovely Original who massacred 12 Hybrids and murdered Carol Lockwood Klaus. So fair warning that there is definitely some violence in this chapter!

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She will stay there till the morning
Crawl behind us as we are yawning
And she will leave our game
To never be the same
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The room was thick with tension, neither of the Forbes women moving from their spots on the opposite beds for the moment. Caroline had just finished telling the entire ordeal she had been through, half convinced she was crazy herself, and could nearly see the wheels turning in her mother's head as Liz tried to even comprehend what all had happened. Caroline didn't want to explain anymore, didn't want to think about the insanity that she'd just gone through and was still going through. All she wanted was for her mother to hug her tightly and tell her that little white lie that everything would be okay, even though they both knew that it wasn't true.

Liz seemed to sense her own need as she crossed the open space and pulled her daughter into a hug, still unable to voice any of her concerns. Caroline knew she needed to be strong, that she needed to pull herself together, but for just a few minutes she desperately wanted to hold tightly onto her mother and pretend the world would make sense again. Like when she was five and fell off the bike that first time, arms and legs scraped up and her mother and father had soothed her worries and convinced her to try again. But the world had stopped making sense when she'd woken to Katherine in her hospital room and died thinking her best friend was suffocating her with a pillow.

Caroline knew she needed to change her perception of so many things: time, the world, right and wrong probably as well. She was a vampire and that meant so much of what she had known wasn't correct anymore. Just like her mother had learned that not all vampires were evil, Caroline knew she needed to learn what something like eternity truly meant. But in so many ways her mind was still hardwired like a human, probably because she hadn't lived so long as a vampire, and still managed to cling desperately to her human ways. Give her fifty years and what would her perception look like then?

As if that wasn't enough change to deal with, now she had to deal with what she was deeming to be the family curse, because how could being some sort of almost immortal bringer of death ever be a good thing? Oh sure there was the whole "rebirth" part to it, but Caroline wasn't naive. People were still going to die and she would be the one ushering in that age. Somehow. She still didn't understand that part at all.

"We'll figure this out, Caroline," Liz murmured against her hair, brushing her fingers through her daughter's curls. She hadn't ever been one for hugging really, but she could tell her daughter needed the contact, and so did she. "I don't care what those women told you. They're wrong."

Caroline let out a shaky breath before forcing herself to get control over her emotions. But were they? It hadn't seemed like a cheap parlor trick and she was currently in possession of more property and money than she even knew what to do with. It just happened to come with the price tag that she was now some kind of herald of doom. Or rebirth. Or whatever they wanted to call it. Her head felt like she'd just drank a vault full of liquor and she pulled away from Liz' embrace, trying to offer a smile as she looked at her, but none would come.

"I don't think they are...were, mom." She shrugged, unsure of what else to say besides that. "You said the woman I described looked like the grandma you remembered."